


cut my hair

by hinazu



Category: Fairy Tail
Genre: Abandonment Issues, Boundaries, Domestic, Epiphanies, F/M, Gruvia - Freeform, Hair touching, Home, Lazy Days, Songfic, during time skip, inspired by cavetown, soft, the development they deserve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-24
Updated: 2019-03-24
Packaged: 2019-12-06 20:01:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18224789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hinazu/pseuds/hinazu
Summary: how they deal when they're on their own.(takes place after fairy tail 2014, before fairy tail 2018.)





	cut my hair

 

 

A long time coming.

Juvia heard the door swing open and jumped out of her chair, out of her reverie. “Gray?”

No reply, but she heard him shuffling out of his jacket, tossing it over the back of their couch. His footsteps led him to the kitchen, and Juvia’s shoulders sank when she took his face in. He was avoiding her eyes, avoiding her entirely, leading her to wonder if he noticed her presence at all. She tended to disappear sometimes, as did he. He was surely disappearing now. Slipping away.

It must’ve been a bad day at work.

“Gray?”

They’d dropped it down from “-sama” recently, a few weeks back when Gray had scared the soul out of Juvia by crying.

_“How distant do you see me that you could hold me that far above your head?” he had yelled, mostly to the world. He never yelled at Juvia, but she thought he sometimes forgot she was in the room when he did this. It was like his eyes clouded over; he was seeing something that wasn’t really there._

_Her heart had broken. She’d always been confused as to why he reacted the way he did to her nickname for him, but he’d never given her an explanation. Until now. It made Juvia think about the cosmic gap that seemed to lay in the charged distance between them, the one that was always there. It made them feel like polar opposites, with like charges that kept them apart. But something in the air broke when he said that, broke with the tone of his voice, the question, the begging. He really wanted an answer. He wanted so many answers that nobody could give, but this time it was one that Juvia had. She’d never really thought about it before, but she was sure that she had it._

_“Oh, Gray,” she’d breathed, pressing her hand to her heart to stop the breaking. She’d taken a few steps closer to him, pressing on their distance, making her way from the doorway to where he was standing by her bed. (It was mostly their bed now; on nights when he slept fitfully, he would tap her awake on the shoulder and ask without words. She always scooted over, leaving it unspoken that the bed was way too big for her anyway, that it made her feel like she was lost in the ocean sometimes. He would climb in with his back to her. They never touched.)_

_His chin was tucked to his chest, head in his hands, soft breaths catching. He sunk to the bed with his shoulders tucked into himself, and Juvia found her feet sinking into the carpet right in front of him. Instead of sinking to her knees before him, instead of taking his hands in hers, instead of untangling him from himself like she wanted to, she pushed the urge down and sat beside him. There was careful distance; she didn’t want to break it now._

_“That isn’t― that’s not why― Juvia didn’t know . . . I didn’t know you felt like that.” Now that she had started talking, she didn’t really know where to begin. Years of damage had gotten them both to this point, the point where they couldn’t understand each other because they couldn’t understand themselves. But the longer Juvia looked, the longer she realized her mistake― this wasn’t her Gray-sama, because her Gray-sama had never really existed. All this time she had idolized him, holding him to impossible standards every single second they spent in this house together._

_At the guild, it was easier for him to pretend. But it had been three months now when his only break was after sunset._

_She took a breath. “Juvia was wrong. She saw you as very big, bigger than life for saving her. For giving her the sun for the very first time. For giving her family, she considered you the very best. She was mistaken and got ahead of herself; she forgot to consider you a friend, first.”_

_She felt his breath catch, felt it filter out just as unsteady. He was fragile now, in her eyes. Not in the way that she had to wear safety gloves (she respected him too much for that). But in the way that she saw how she’d accidentally taken honesty off the table, and she needed to put it back now._

_“Juvia believes she has been unfair to you, Gray. She believes she has made you feel as thought you had to be big. She wants you to know that― she wants you to know that this is not the case. You are allowed to be exactly who you are at every moment, and she will be here always to bandage you, pull you up, fight for you if she must. You are fully capable, but that will not stop Juvia from being here regardless. She is deeply, deeply sorry for making Gray feel like he has a show to put on in his own home.”_

_There was a beat. “Home,” he whispered in response, the softest and roughest she had heard from him. His only response._

_Juvia waited a beat to see if there was any more he wanted to say. She hadn’t realized until after she said what she did how true it was, how deeply she felt that way. She had been wrong, but she would do her best to make it right. She would change herself from a pressure into someone to be trusted, for Gray. A companion. No expectations._

_“Is it okay if Juvia touches you?” She would never without asking._

_He turned his back to her ever so slightly, her unspoken permission to rest her hand between his shoulders, rubbing gentle circles into the knots of stress he kept there. He kept everything right there; he was always so tense, and for perhaps the first time Juvia saw him as a boy._

She shook her head out of the memory, focused on the Gray in front of her now. The one in the kitchen, the one disappearing. She frowned.

“Gray?”

He breathed, moving past her to her bedroom. She heard her bed creak, picturing the way he would flop like a fish face-down, and let out a sigh of her own. It was to be a long night.

* * *

She found herself laying down next to him, on her back. The sun had set in the time they spent not moving, not speaking, barely breathing. She was beginning to slip in between waking and sleep, her eyes tired from tracing the patterns on her ceiling, when he finally spoke.

“It was a child. An orphan,” he said, his voice scratchy and muffled by the bed. She turned her head towards him just barely and saw that he had his cheek rested on folded arms, his eyes focused on nothing. He had beautiful eyes. It made Juvia sad to see how often they were dull.

He kept going. “He was stealing from a vendor, and they wanted me to catch him. I found him in an alley, with a watermelon. He was trying to figure out how to open it.” Fiore’s summers were famous for their fruits, full and ripe and delicious in high-demand. For that reason most would consider it a major crime to steal a melon, but Juvia disagreed. Stealing was bad, but letting a child starve alone was worse.

Gray thought so too. His voice was strained. “I let him keep it. I gave him directions to the guild, and I came home. Or I tried to. I ended up at the river, and I didn’t leave until the sun started going down. Then I came home.”

It always made a knot tighten in Juvia’s chest when she heard him say ‘home’. Logically it was, but he’d only made the switch recently. It always used to be ‘house’, but after their talk the change was immediate. Sometimes when he was upset and not speaking, they would sit together on the couch. He would play with her curls, twirling them around his fingers and tugging gently. She would always let him, but he always asked first. Never verbally; he said most of the things he wanted to say by not saying them at all. He would tap her shoulder lightly and she would turn to look at him and he would be asking with his eyes, and she would say yes. That’s just how they always were.

This was home to him.

She swallowed. “Did he find it? The guild?”

“I have no idea. I couldn't go back and ask. I didn’t.” He sounded lost. She knew he saw himself today. She knew he always saw himself.

His heart broke too much, she thought. She wished she could put a charm on it, to keep it protected. She wished he would let her protect him more.

She felt a tap on her shoulder and nodded, feeling his fingers slip into her hair, tugging on little blue ringlets. They stayed like that for a long time; he must’ve fallen asleep after her, because his tugging had lulled her to sleep, but he was still there when she woke up.

* * *

They had been together for about nine months when she cut her hair off again. It kept getting in everything, and he had been poking fun at her for months about finding long blue hairs all over his clothes. It wasn’t too short (she could still put it up) but it was enough that it didn’t tickle her waist anymore. It rested on her shoulder blades now.

Gray didn’t say anything when he came home to her new hair. Instead he had rested his hands on her shoulders, and she nodded, and he held her face and dragged his hands back into her hair, tangling it between his fingers in light fairy touches, pulling her close and breaking every single expectation she still held.

His lips were so much softer than she could’ve ever imagined.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! i absolutely adore cavetown and after having this song stuck in my head all day i just had to do something about it. please listen to this song to improve your quality of life greatly :>


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